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Acknowledgments ix
Contributors xi
Chronology: Japan’s Historical Eras xvii
Introduction: Japanese Culinary Capital 1 Nancy K. Stalker
PART I. JAPAN’S CULINARY BRANDS AND IDENTITIES
Historical c ulinary i dentities 33
1. Japanese Food in the Early Modern European Imagination 35 Ken Albala
2. Gifting Melons to the Shining Prince: Food in the Late Heian Court Imagination 48 Takeshi Watanabe
3. Soba, Edo Style: Food, Aesthetics, and Cultural Identity 65 Lorie Brau
4. The Three Waves (and Ways) of Sake Appreciation in the West 81 Dick Stegewerns
c ulinary n ationalism and Branding 97
5. Washoku, Far and Near: UNESCO, Gastrodiplomacy, and the Cultural Politics of Traditional Japanese Cuisine 99
Theodore C. Bestor
6. “We Can Taste but Others Cannot”: Umami as an Exclusively Japanese Concept 118 Yoshimi Osawa
7. Rosanjin: The Roots of Japanese Gourmet Nationalism 133
Nancy K. Stalker
r egional and i nternational Variations 151
8. Savoring the Kyoto Brand 153
Greg de St. Maurice
9. Love! Spam: Food, Military, and Empire in Post–World War II Okinawa 171
Mire Koikari
10. Nikkei Cuisine: How Japanese Food Travels and Adapts Abroad 187
Ayumi Takenaka
PART II. JAPAN’S FOOD- RELATED VALUES
Food and i ndi V idual i dentity 205
11. Miso Mama: How Meals Make the Mother in Contemporary Japan 207
Amanda C. Seaman
12. Better Than Sex? Masaoka Shiki’s Poems on Food 220 J. Keith Vincent
13. The Devouring Empire: Food and Memory in Hayashi Fumiko’s Wartime Narratives and Naruse Mikio’s Films 242
Noriko J. Horiguchi
Food a nxieties 259
14. Eating amid Affluence: Kaikō Takeshi’s Adventures in Food 261 Bruce Suttmeier
15. An Anorexic in Miyazaki’s Land of Cockaigne: Excess and Abnegation in Spirited Away 273
Susan Napier
16. Discarding Cultures: Social Critiques of Food Waste in an Affluent
Japan 287
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
17. The Unbearable, Endless Anxiety of Eating: Food Consumption in Japan after 3/11 302
Faye Yuan Kleeman
Afterword: Foods of Japan, Not Japanese Food 312
Eric C. Rath
Glossary 329 Index 339
Acknowledgments
In 2013, UNESCO recognized Japanese cuisine (washoku) on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. To commemorate this award, my UT Austin Japanese Studies colleagues Patricia Machlachlan, Kirsten Cather, and I decided to host a year-long program on Japanese foodways featuring guest lectures, films, and a conference entitled Devouring Japan: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Japanese Cuisine and Foodways, held in February 2014. All of these events were made possible though a generous grant from the Japan Foundation’s Small Grant Program. We are also grateful for additional support received from other sponsors, including the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies and the Mitsubishi Caterpillar Heavy Industries Endowment. Papers by many of the scholars who participated in the conference became the basis for this volume. We also gratefully acknowledge the contributions of scholars who made presentations at the conference that are not part of the final volume, including Victoria Lyon Bestor, Robert Hellyer, Barak Kushner, Patricia Maclachlan, Amy Bliss Marshall, Robyn Metcalfe, Yoneyuki Sugita, R. Kenji Tierney, and Merry White. Their thoughtful and critical participation helped make the conference a success. We also wish to thank Mark Metzler, Kirsten Cather, Robert Oppenheim, Madeline Hsu, Heather Hindman, and Robyn Metcalfe for chairing panels and offering vital comments and questions for participants. Staff members from UT’s Department of Asian Studies, especially Jeannie Cortez and Saleha Parvaiz, provided
invaluable assistance in organizing, administering, and overseeing logistics. Nicole Elmer created wonderful graphics and posters for the conference. Erin Newton, a graduate student, organized a troupe of student volunteers, including the members of my Cuisine and Culture in Asia course, and helped manage many conference-related matters. Zachary Long assisted with proofreading and editing the volume. Finally, we offer our deep gratitude to Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press for her interest in and support of this project and to the anonymous Press reviewers who provided helpful and detailed critiques that guided us in the revision process.
Contributors
Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific and Chair of the Food Studies MA program in San Francisco. He has authored or edited twenty-four books on food, including Eating Right in the Renaissance, Food in Early Modern Europe, Cooking in Europe, 1250–1650, The Banquet, Beans (winner 2008 IACP Jane Grigson Award), Pancake, Grow Food, Cook Food, Share Food, and Nuts: A Global History. He was coeditor of the journal Food, Culture and Society and has also coedited The Business of Food, Human Cuisine, and Food and Faith and edited A Cultural History of Food: The Renaissance and The Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies. Albala was editor of the Food Cultures Around the World series, the four-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia, and the three-volume Sage Encyclopedia of Food Issues published in 2015. He is also series editor of Rowman and Littlefield Studies in Food and Gastronomy, for which he wrote Three World Cuisines (winner of the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards’ best foreign cuisine book in the world for 2012). He has also coauthored two cookbooks: The Lost Art of Real Cooking and The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home. His latest works are a Food History Reader and a translation of the sixteenth-century Livre fort excellent de cuysine. His course Food: A Cultural Culinary History is available on DVD from the Great Courses. He is now working on a book about noodle soups.
Theodore C. Bestor is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of Neighborhood Tokyo and Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, among many other publications. He is the coeditor of Doing Fieldwork in Japan and the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society. Bestor was featured in the documentary Tsukiji Wonderland (directed by Naotarō Endō). His current research focuses on the controversial relocation of the Tsukiji marketplace to make way for the 2020 Olympics and on various aspects of Japanese food culture, including perceptions of washoku in Japan and abroad, the concept of umami, and Japanese cuisine outside Japan. Bestor was the founding president of the Society for East Asian Anthropology in 2001–2003, and in 2012–2013 he was President of the Association of Asian Studies.
Lorie Brau is an Associate Professor of Japanese in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of New Mexico. She received her MA in Japanese literature from the University of Michigan and her PhD in performance studies at New York University (1994). To research her book Rakugo: Performing Comedy and Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Tokyo, she became a disciple of storyteller Kokontei Engiku and learned to perform Japanese comic storytelling. She is an avid reader and researcher of such culinary manga as Oishinbo (The gourmet) and is presently writing a monograph on the discourses of culinary manga titled Gourmanga: Reading Food in Japanese Comic Books.
Greg de St. Maurice is a cultural anthropologist whose research is primarily concerned with “place,” globalization, foodways, and Japan. He currently serves as the Vice President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS). He received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015. His recent publications include “Kyoto Cuisine Gone Global” (in Gastronomica), “Everything but the Taste: Celebrating Kyoto’s Shishigatani Squash as Culinary Heritage” (in Food, Culture, and Society), and “The Movement to Reinvigorate Local Food Culture in Kyoto, Japan” (in the edited volume Food Activism).
Noriko J. Horiguchi (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is an Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of Tennessee. Her research is at the interface of literary criticism, history, women’s studies, and cultural studies. Horiguchi’s first monograph, Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body, examines women’s paradoxical relationship with the empire of Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. Horiguchi’s second book project, on the discourse on food, examines narratives (political, literary, and visual)
and memories of food and hunger that negotiated, both materially and metaphorically, the power dynamics among Japan, neighboring Asian nations, and the Western powers (especially the United States) in the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods.
Faye Yuan Kleeman is a Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the University of Colorado. She specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese and literature, Japanophone studies, as well as film, gender, (post)colonial theory, and visual culture. Her works include In Transit, Under an Imperial Sun, and recent articles “Chain Reactions—Japanese Colonialism and Global Cosmopolitanism in East Asia,” “Body (Language) across the Sea: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Embodiment of Post/colonial Modernity,” “Body, Identity, and Social Order: Japanese Crime Fiction,” and “Exophony and the Locations of (Cultural) Identity in Levy Hideo’s Fiction.”
Mire Koikari is Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her publications include Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East Asia and Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan. Her research interests include feminism, militarism, and imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region. She is currently working on a project in which she explores gendered and gendering dynamics of safety and security politics in Japan following the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in 2011.
Susan Napier is the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric at Tufts University. Previously she held the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair at the University of Texas. She attended Harvard University for both undergraduate and graduate degrees, all of which were in East Asian studies. She has also taught at the University of London and been a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Sydney and a visiting scholar at Keio University in Tokyo. Her first two books were on Japanese literature, and she has since published two books on Japanese animation along with numerous articles and book chapters. Her new book on the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki will appear in 2018.
Yoshimi Osawa is an ethnobiologist and an anthropologist of food and the senses. She received her PhD from the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. Dr. Osawa’s research centers on understanding of relationship between humans and nature, particularly by looking at food, ecology, and human sensory perceptions. She has published in several key journals including The Senses and Society and Ecology of Food and Nutrition. She is currently based at
Kyoto University as a University Research Administrator and also serves as Deputy Director of the Kyoto University ASEAN Center in Bangkok.
Eric C. Rath is Professor of Premodern Japanese History at the University of Kansas, where his courses include History of Sushi and Beer, Sake, and Tea: Beverages in Japanese History. A specialist in the history of Japanese dietary cultures, he is the author of Japan’s Cuisines: Food, Place and Identity and Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan, and editor with Stephanie Assmann of Japanese Foodways Past and Present. He is now writing a history of food in Japan.
Amanda C. Seaman received her PhD in East Asian languages and civilizations from the University of Chicago, and is a Professor of Japanese Language and Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In addition to her books Bodies of Evidence: Women, Society, and Detective Fiction in 1990s Japan and Writing Pregnancy in Low-Fertility Japan, she is the author of numerous articles on contemporary Japanese detective fiction and women’s literature, and the translator of works by Matsuo Yumi, Matsuura Rieko, and Takahashi Takako. Her current research focuses upon popular cultural representations of, and reactions to, illness and disease in modern Japan.
Eiko Maruko Siniawer is a Professor of History at Williams College. She is the author of Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan, which examines issues of political violence and democracy through a focus on violence specialists. Currently, Siniawer is completing a book that examines shifts in what was considered waste and wasteful in Japan from the 1940s through the present. An article on this research has been published in the Journal of Asian Studies. Siniawer holds a PhD in history from Harvard University.
Nancy K. Stalker is the Soshitsu Sen XV Distinguished Professor of Traditional Japanese Culture and History at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research focuses on twentieth-century material culture in Japan, examining the interplay between ideology and market forces in manifestations of traditional culture in modern eras. She received her PhD in East Asian History from Stanford University and is the author of Japan: History and Culture from Classical to Cool, Prophet Motive: Deguchi Onisaburō, Oomoto and the Rise of a New Religion in Imperial Japan, and numerous articles published in such journals as the Journal of Japanese Studies, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, and Gastronomica. She is currently working on a book entitled Budding Fortunes: Ikebana as Art, Industry, and Cold War Culture and conducting research on the relationship between culinary identity and masculinity in modern Japan.
Dick Stegewerns is Associate Professor at the University of Oslo and Visiting Professor at Nichibunken, Kyoto. He teaches courses on modern Japanese history, international relations, politics, society, culture, and film. At present he conducts research projects on postwar Japanese war films, a century of democracy in Japan, the visualization of Japanese history in film, manga and anime, the discourse on the dichotomy of Eastern and Western civilization (Tōzai bunmeiron), the Japanese film director Naruse Mikio, and a global modern history of the Japanese fermented drink sake. His main publications are Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan, Adjusting to the New World: Japanese Opinion Leaders of the Taishō Generation and the Outside World, and Yoshida Kijū: 50 Years of Avant-Garde Filmmaking in Postwar Japan. He is also active in introducing some of his interests in Japan to Europe, in the form of film retrospectives, concert tours, and pure sake tastings.
Bruce Suttmeier is Associate Dean of Faculty and Associate Professor of Japanese at Lewis & Clark College. He has published on several postwar writers, including Kaikō Takeshi and Ōe Kenzaburō, as well as on travel writing in the 1960s and on war memory in the postwar period. His recent work includes “Speculations of Murder: Ghostly Dreams, Poisonous Frogs and the Return of Yokoi Shōichi” in Perversion and Modern Japan: Experiments in Psychoanalysis, and “On the Road in Olympic-Era Tokyo” in Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps
Ayumi Takenaka currently teaches sociology at Aston University. Her main research interests lie in the global mobility of people and food and their transformations over time and across spaces. She has engaged in research primarily in the areas of immigration, identities, social inequality, and diaspora politics in Japan, the United States, Latin America (mostly Peru), and Europe (Spain and the UK). Her current research projects include the computational analysis of global remigration patterns, immigrants’ social mobility in Japan and Spain, and gastrodiplomacy in Peru. She also engages in activities to promote washoku in the UK and Europe.
J. Keith Vincent is Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature and Chair of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University. He is the author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction. Recent essays include “Takemura Kazuko: On Friendship and the Queering of American and Japanese Studies” in Rethinking Japanese Feminism, and “Queer Reading in Japanese Literature,” in the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature. His translation of Okamoto Kanoko’s A Riot of Goldfish won the 2011 U.S. Japan Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of
Japanese Literature, and New Directions published his translation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novel Devils in Daylight. Together with Alan Tansman and Reiko Abe Auestad, he is currently coediting two collections of essays on the novelist Natsume Sōseki. He is also writing a book on the literary friendship between Sōseki and Masaoka Shiki.
Takeshi Watanabe is an Assistant Professor in the College of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. He received his PhD in premodern Japanese literature from Yale University. He has published work in English and Japanese on the sixteenth-century Illustrated Scroll of the Wine or Rice Debate. He has also contributed to the tea utensil exhibition catalog Tea Culture of Japan. A short essay on Heian court cuisine is forthcoming in Birth of a Monarch: Selections from Fujiwara no Munetada’s Journal “Chūyūki”. After completing his current manuscript on the eleventh-century historical tale A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, he is planning to work on ambivalent representations of food and consumption from ancient to medieval Japan.
Why do today’s celebrity chefs seem so besotted with Japan? David Chang, subject of the first season of PBS’s The Mind of a Chef, who named his New York restaurant Momofuku after the inventor of instant ramen, asserts that Tokyo is the world’s best food city and that “nothing comes close.”1 Rene Redzepi, founder of Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant voted best in the world for several consecutive years, relocated his entire operation to Tokyo for five weeks in January 2015 to open a “pop-up” at the five-star Mandarin Oriental Hotel, chronicled in the documentary Ants on a Shrimp (2016). In an interview Redzepi explained his rationale: “I wanted to get as close as possible to the country’s mind-boggling culinary variety and the devotion to craft that fellow chefs from the West speak of in hushed and reverential tones.”2 And the king of food celebrities, Anthony Bourdain, visited Japan more frequently than any other foreign country save France in his TV series No Reservations and Parts Unknown and even penned a graphic novel, Get Jiro, about a “renegade” sushi chef in Los Angeles who beheads a customer for requesting a California roll.3 What is it about Japanese cuisine that currently attracts the admiration of both celebrity chefs and ordinary diners around the globe? In other words, why is Japan increasingly a source of culinary capital— that is, food-based status and power?4
Japanese cuisine has been rising in international esteem since the 1980s, when sushi first began to conquer the West, but in recent years it has reached new heights of global popularity, with the number of Japanese restaurants outside Japan doubling between 2003 and 2013.5 It increasingly challenges the primacy of French, considered
the pinnacle of haute cuisine since the eighteenth century. In 2009, the French were the first to receive UNESCO recognition for their food, when their “gastronomic meal” was named to UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list, an honor Japan achieved in 2013 (see the Bestor chapter in this volume). Some food critics, however, increasingly view French cuisine as “dull” and “predictable.”6 As early as 1997 Adam Gopnik complained that even French nouvelle cuisine was overly rich and had become formulaic. “The hold of the master sauté pan, and the master sauce, and the thing-in-the-middle-of-the-plate, is still intact.”7
Research from Krishnendu Ray’s recent book The Ethnic Restaurateur, which uses Zagat guides and major US newspapers to gauge the comparative popularity of ethnic cuisines in the United States, confirms such opinions. Ray graphically demonstrates that interest in French and Continental cuisine (with the exception of Italian) has declined sharply since the 1940s, while interest in, and the price of, Japanese restaurant meals has climbed steadily since the 1980s, surpassing the average cost of a French meal in the mid-2010s.8 The most expensive meal in New York is generally acknowledged to be at Masa’s, a three-Michelin-star, sushi-centric restaurant with a tasting menu of twenty or more courses that runs over five hundred dollars per person, before wine. As the culinary star of the French fades, Japan is the current ingénue of the global gourmet economy, with both its highbrow and its lowbrow cuisines earning accolades and devotees at home and abroad.
On the elite end of the spectrum, Tokyo has more Michelin-starred restaurants than Paris and New York combined. Of the 213 Tokyo restaurants awarded stars in 2016, 141 feature Japanese cuisine. Awardees also include Japanese branches of celebrated French restaurants, from the old-school Tour d’Argent to contemporary establishments by master chefs such as Joel Robuchon, Alain Ducasse, and Paul Bocuse, but the vast majority of the forty-eight French and ten Italian Michelin-starred restaurants are helmed by European-trained Japanese chefs who fuse local ingredients and sensibilities with techniques learned abroad, as illustrated in figure I.1. Among New York’s Michelin-starred establishments, Japanese cuisine is usually the most dominant international category.9
In terms of lowbrow cuisine, humble ramen noodles have achieved cult status in many American cities, thanks in part to the efforts of David Chang, who first achieved acclaim in 2004 for his Momofuku Noodle Bar and who featured ramen as the theme for the first issue of his hip food quarterly Lucky Peach. Ramen and its purveyors in America have been lionized in mainstream publications such as the New York Times and Food & Wine alongside trendier food media, including Lucky Peach, Saveur, and Roads & Kingdoms. Its ascent,
in both Japan and the United States, took surprising routes. Ramen was first introduced in Japan in the nineteenth century, when it was considered an inexpensive Chinese food for laborers and students. During the post–World War II occupation, a time of dire food shortages, American wheat imports spurred ramen’s popularity; the invention of instant ramen in 1958 by Momofuku Ando made the dish a cheap staple for the masses and began the process of changing its national identification to distinctly Japanese. In the 1970s, as Japanese domestic tourism boomed, so did ramen; local variations (e.g., Sapporo’s misobased broth, Fukuoka’s thick tonkotsu style, and Iwate’s light chicken broth) became available nationwide. Ramen quickly became the most popular object of lowbrow culinary connoisseurship, a trend that expanded even further with the advent of the Internet and social media.10
Instant ramen was introduced in the United States in the 1970s as a commodity, fueling college students and jail inmates alike for as little as twenty-five cents per serving. Few could have imagined that this chemical-laden sodium bomb would transform into a gourmet dish. New Yorkers and Los Angelinos
Figure i.1 Example of Japanese-French plating of grilled squid at chef Shibata Hideyuki’s La Clairiere in Tokyo. Photograph by the author.
became fans of “real” ramen in the early to mid-2000s, as branches of iconic Japanese shops, such as Ippudō and Tsujita, began to appear in these cities. By 2014 a New Yorker cartoon portrayed a mother giving advice to her adolescent son: “We could have a lemonade stand, sweetie, but wouldn’t you rather do a pop-up ramen shop?”11 Quality ramen is now even fashionable in Middle America. In Austin, Texas, for example, there are at least four dedicated ramen shops, including the Japanese chain Jinya. Ramen Tatsu-ya, established locally, was named one of Bon Appetit’s fifty best new restaurants in 2013 and America’s best ramen by Time Out in 2016. Hipsters, Japanese expats, and middle-aged professors queue there for an hour or more for a delectable bowl. Whole Foods Market, the upscale grocery chain headquartered in Austin, features a madeto-order ramen counter at many locations. In the United States today, good restaurant ramen represents an affordable, yet exotic and “authentic,” gourmet experience.
Before America’s ramen craze, Japanese cuisine became chic among elites beginning in the late 1980s, largely through the efforts of maverick chefs traveling global circuits and creating innovative dishes that appealed to cosmopolitan palates. Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, founder of Nobu, was frustrated with the ten-year apprenticeship required of sushi chefs in Japan and so decamped to Peru, where he infused sashimi with local flavors like chili and cilantro for expat Japanese elites, and then to Beverly Hills, where he served it lightly seared with hot oil for Americans unaccustomed to raw fish.12 His signature miso-marinated black cod and elegant omakase (chef’s choice) menus attracted celebrities, such as Robert DeNiro, who became Matsuhisa’s partner for the 1994 opening of Nobu in New York. Eschewing traditional decor for cutting-edge style, it soon became a sophisticated global brand, with thirty-three branches on five continents today. Nobu’s unconventional route to culinary stardom opened the door for non-Japanese chefs, such as David Chang, Tim Cushman of Boston’s Oya, and Austin’s Tyson Cole of Uchi and Uchiko, to appropriate and play with Japanese cuisine with minimal in-country training. In a recent volume on the globalization of Asian cuisine, James Farrer refers to this phenomenon as the “deterritorialization of culinary fields, or the delinking of cuisine from place,” noting that important innovations in “national” cuisines often occur outside their borders by foreign chefs with a variety of kitchen experience.13 Unmoored from arduous traditional training and loyalty to the master, such chefs create hybrid cuisines that are, nevertheless, experienced as “authentically Japanese” by many customers.
As Japan’s reputation for its cuisine expands abroad, its food and foodrelated practices are increasingly a source of individual identity, cultural capital, and distinction among a broad range of food producers and consumers
around the globe.14 In their work Culinary Capital, Peter Naccarato and Kathleen Lebesco argue that such capital is increasingly valued in contemporary American culture but recognize that “all cultures use food and food practices as a way of conferring cultural authority and circulating dominant ideologies just as their citizens may use them to both reinforce and transgress their culture’s norms.”15 They also assert that culinary capital is increasingly considered a geopolitical asset, “separating and stratifying countries based on the extent to which they aspire to particular, favored foodways” in a global gourmet economy.16 Americans are ever more conscious of food identities and quick to seize upon food fashions, such as ramen, but the Japanese hunger for culinary capital, both individual and national, is equal to if not greater than the American pursuit; in Japan, as in the United States, food is currently an allconsuming matter.
As Naccarato and Lebesco note, culinary capital does not accrue to individuals alone, but also to businesses, public and private institutions, and localities from village to nation. At a national level, cuisine has become one of Japan’s most visible and influential cultural “brands” abroad, an important source of soft power in the world. “Place branding,” the practice of marketing nations, regions, and cities, promoted by development gurus like Simon Anholt, identifies and promotes aspects of an area’s culture to provide it with an appealing personality, affecting its ability to attract media attention, tourism, public and private investment, and even new residents and students.17 Foods are, of course, popular and widely recognized aspects of most national brands. Within nations, too, regional and city culinary brands are increasingly important aspects of local identity, recognized by both domestic and foreign connoisseurs. Scholarship on Japanese popular culture and its soft power abroad has focused largely on mass media (e.g., manga, anime), giving inadequate attention to food cultures as components of Japan’s contemporary nation brand.
Together with manga and anime, pop music, fashion, and “cute” consumer goods, cuisine is part of the “Cool Japan” brand that promotes the country as a new kind of pop cultural superpower, the “Pokémon Hegemon” exporting Hello Kitty, pop idols, animated films, and other forms of popular culture.18 While the notion of Cool Japan has circulated in the international mass media since the early 2000s, the Japanese government has only recently embraced this reputation, establishing the Creative Industries Promotion Office in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in 2010. METI recognized the significance of cuisine for national branding and specified B-kyū gurume (second-class gourmet), the celebration of creative and local versions of Japanese comfort foods like fried noodles (yakisoba) and okonomiyaki savory pancakes,
as a key element of its Cool Japan initiative.19 Foods can also be marketed by adopting other elements of the Cool Japan brand as seen in the Hello Kitty confections illustrated in figure I.2. Other governmental agencies, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), and the Japanese National Tourist Organization (JNTO), are also deeply invested in the idea of Japanese culinary identity as a source of national soft power.
The imagining, branding, and representation of Japanese culinary identity, which tend to highlight purity, seasonality, and aesthetic presentation, do not, however, necessarily conform to historical and social realities. As a whole, this
Figure i.2 Hello Kitty bean jam buns (manjū) at Tokyu Toyoko department store in Shibuya. Photograph by the author.
volume casts a critical eye toward idealization of Japanese cuisine and culinary values that inadequately consider the actual eating habits and everyday foods consumed by the Japanese. The title Devouring Japan allows a transnational perspective whereby Japan can be analyzed as subject or object, the nation that devours or is devoured by others. What does Japanese cuisine (washoku) mean to different audiences? What food-related values are imposed or implied by the term? What roles do media, the state, and other social institutions play in shaping notions of national cuisine? What elements of washoku are most visible in Japan’s international culinary identity and why? Does the global enthusiasm for Japanese cuisine indicate the decline of Euro-American influence and the ascendance of Asian nations in post–Cold War geopolitics, or, rather, is it a form of orientalist appropriation? Individually, essays from a variety of disciplinary perspectives question how food and foodways have come to represent aspects of a “unique” Japanese identity. They call attention to how cuisine has been used as a foil to assert a culinary identity that contrasts with that of the Euro-American “other” and how cuisine and foodways are infused with official and unofficial ideologies. They reveal how food habits and choices are gendered and scrutinized by the state, mass media, and the public at large. And they examine the thoughts, actions, and motives of those who produce, consume, promote, represent, and work with foods.
The Globalization of Japanese Food
The current popularity of Japanese cuisine might seem surprising from a historical perspective. The premodern traditional diet was bland and monotonous, consisting largely of rough grains like millet and barley, sometimes mixed with rice and local vegetables. The widely held domestic conception of a “traditional Japanese meal” as a bowl of steamed white rice with miso soup, pickles, and three side dishes (ichijū sansai) did not become a possibility for most Japanese until well after World War II. That meal was not one particularly coveted by international audiences. Although Ken Albala’s chapter points out early modern European admiration for Japanese foodways, foreign travelers to Japan from the nineteenth century through the 1970s often complained that native fare, including raw and fermented foods, was unpalatable for Euro-Americans. In 1878, intrepid Victorian traveler Isabella Bird cautioned would-be visitors to Japan to carry their own food, as “the fishy and vegetable abominations known as ‘Japanese food’ can only be swallowed and digested by a few, and that after long practice.”20 Through the 1970s, restaurants in Japan catering to EuroAmerican tourists who wished to sample native cuisine usually offered only
